It'll take a village to sustain this proposed community garden

[jpak]

http://www.pacificatribune.com/localnews/ci_5378022

Harvested in Maui, sugar cane is sent to a processing plant in Contra Costa County and then to New York for packaging. After that, those tiny C&H sugar packets are shipped all over the United States — including back to Hawaii.

"That means even if you live just a mile from the sugar cane fields, your sugar traveled 10,000 miles. This isn't how it should be. The more a community can do to be self-sustaining the better," said Kelley Rajala, owner of Pacifica's Downward Dog Yoga.

Her sugar example is just one of many that demonstrates the country's disconnect between its mode of food production and distribution that disenfranchises local communities from being self-sustaining. Rajalah and and other like-minded Pacificans seek to reverse that model here and in other coastside communities through their new enterprise, The Livability Project.

"This is becoming even more critical with the rising cost of fuel and shortages. Our food typically travels 1,500 miles before it reaches the table," said Rajala.

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[Redstone]

1. "Becoming more critical." indeed. Same with shopping online; the UPS truck needs to make

many individual stops. But if you buy at an actual store, one truck brought a lot of things, not just your individual purchase.

Redstone

[Shallah Kali]

2. I have read that Cuba was forced to turn to community gardens after the USSR went under

they were getting massive subsidies from the USSR including oil. With that gone they had to turn to urban organic gardening because they could not afford to ship food from far off farms to the city nor did they have petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides. it is better to start making changes before being forced to when one has the luxury of time to get things set up properly.

[GliderGuider]

3. Find the movie "The Community Solution"

It's utterly remarkable how Cuba coped with the loss of 80% of its oil. And they did it by privatizing small-plot agriculture.

From http://www.communitysolution.org/cuba.html:

The documentary, "The Power of Community – How Cuba Survived Peak Oil," was inspired when Faith Morgan and Pat Murphy took a trip to Cuba through Global Exchange in August, 2003.

Cuba became, for them, a living example of how a country can successfully traverse what we all will have to deal with sooner or later, the reduction and loss of finite fossil fuel resources.

The goals of this film are to give hope to the developed world as it wakes up to the consequences of being hooked on oil, and to lift American's prejudice of Cuba by showing the Cuban people as they are. The filmmakers do this by having the people tell their story on film. It's a story of their dedication to independence and triumph over adversity.

This is the most hopeful movie I've seen with a Peak Oil theme (OK, it's the only hopeful movie I've seen with a Peak Oil theme...)